The Olympic Ski Jump In Beijing Is Giving Us Nuclear Power Plant Vibes From 'The Simpsons'
"Honestly, what are we even doing here."
When you picture Olympic skiing in your mind, what do you think of? A forested slope? Pristine white powder? Maybe a ruggedly beautiful mountainside?
How about a big slide beside a bunch of gigantic cooling towers?
The big air ski-jumping venue in Beijing is getting absolutely roasted online for the bizarre scene around the facility, which looks a lot like the cartoonish nuclear power plant from The Simpsons.
Well, it's either that or a dystopian hellscape, depending on who you're asking.
"Honestly, what are we even doing here," Twitter user Michael Antonelli asked in a popular tweet on Monday, while sharing a screenshot of the venue.
"The Big Air stadium at the Olympics seems to be right next to the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant," another user tweeted.
OK so the venue is not actually right next to a power plant. In fact, it's right near an old steel mill, so there's no need to worry that the Olympians will come home with radioactive mutant powers.
The big air venue is located at Beijing's Shougang industrial site, a once heavily-polluted area that's getting a major revamp to make it more sustainable, Reuters reports. The ski-jumping venue is actually a part of that revamp, and is expected to remain there even after the Olympics are over.
"The venue is fantastic," U.S.-born Chinese skier Eileen Gu told Reuters before her gold-medal win at the site this week. "I mean, look around, there's no snow anywhere else. And somehow when you're skiing on this job, you feel like you're on a glacier somewhere."
American Alex Hall also praised the scenery in an interview with the Associated Press.
"The like, crazy smokestack things in the back are pretty cool," he said.
Several athletes also praised the venue for one huge factor: it's permanent, meaning it's not as flimsy and potentially dangerous as other places they've been.
“If something like this was sustainable enough to repeat all over the world, I think that would be super-duper cool,” U.S. skier Nick Goepper told the AP.
"This feels like it was created in a virtual world, in a video game."
So there you have it: the big air venue is basically like a video game level with a wild background that makes it look cool.